More like, it’s as smelly as it is dirty. It drinks as much beer as it is dirty.

Raleigh wants you to know that they get it:

Presumably “it” is corporate pandering to a subculture that was sort of cool five years ago. Of course, they’re pulling of a kind of double-pander* by netting the lucrative “aspiring bike messenger” and recent cyclocross convert demographics, which is no mean feat.

[*A position you'll go to jail for trying in China-land. #culturallyinsensitiveinnuendo]

I should point out, by the way, that this isn’t actually a new model or anything, I just wanted some yang to balance my grumpy yin. And you can’t actually buy one of these in the UK in any case, so Raleigh is in no danger of becoming cool here.

This is The Setback Post’s first ever off-topic post. Depending on the reaction, it may or may not be its last. If you’d rather read about cycling, I recommend some Luxembourgish CX or a bit of winter angst.

Image: Getty/Facebook

A Buzzfeed link is doing the rounds of social media at the moment, featuring samples from image-giant Getty’s “Lean In Collection”, which purports to include “more than 2,500 photos of female leadership in contemporary work and life”:

The project began when Pam Grossman, director of visual trends at Getty Images, commissioned a study that would track the changes in the representation of girls and women in the media.

[...]

“This is such a big passion project for all of us, and cheesy as it sounds, by showing people powerful images of women, we thought maybe we could actually change the world,” Grossman told BuzzFeed.

Whilst I applaud the underlying intention, I’m struggling slightly with the idea of stock photography as a medium for social change. Getty is, after all, one of the world’s largest purveyors of women laughing alone with salad, not to mention any number of gender role-reinforcing scenarios.

And that’s kind of the point of stock photography; it’s not inherently evil, but it exists to supply a cosy, bland visual language to companies and content producers who want familiar, unchallenging tropes to illustrate their websites and articles. It’s the reason you can safely look for a hot woman wearing a headset* if you want customer service, and why university campuses everywhere are littered with the bodies of students who died of exposure from working outside:

Image: Google

Getty would probably argue their project acts to normalise the idea of women in non-traditional roles, but to me the act of using stock photography is itself one of tokenism.

Rather than buying an image of a Lean In woman for your corporate website, wouldn’t it make more sense to take photographs of actual female members of your workforce? And if you don’t have any, maybe you should be asking why, rather than using staged photos of strangers as window dressing.

*To keep things bike related and also undermine this post completely, I asked fellow blogger Jack Luke of mycountry.cc to ’shop a headset of the more familiar kind onto a lady for comedic purposes. The result was this decidedly un-feminist and mildy NSFW image. You’re welcome/I’m sorry.

It’s unclear to me what set of rules my internal bike maintenance schedule abides by. Sometimes something in me snaps, and action must be taken. This time it was the thought of the poor, benighted Speedplays on The Last Bike I Will Ever Buy* experiencing another day of dry, ill-lubricated drudgery.

[*It's titanium. When you buy Ti, you are legally obliged to remind people that it mates for life. Them's the rules.]

So, I got greasy.

Forget your fancy pants grease guns and cartridges of unob-lubium. What you need is a piece of crap plastic syringe off ebay and the grease of your choice. Normally I endorse the use of the el-cheapest of the el-cheapo because it used to come in a tin that even the truly slow of cadence would struggle to misinterpret (it doesn’t anymore, sadly, whatever Amazon may claim):

…but on this occasion I had half a syringe of the posh bike stuff to use up, and also it’s much easier to refill the syringe from a tube than from a pot so there’s that.

Anyway.

Servicing these is straightforward and in no way warrants photography, but I know y’all love a bit of screwdriver on screw action:

You people make me sick.

That’s the screw that seals off the grease port. Once it’s removed and in no way lost on the floor, it’s time to play Doctor.

I’m making this look easy by doing it all nonchalantly and one-handed, but that was just so I could hold the camera. It actually takes a bit of pressure to force grease through the pedal and you’ll probably need both paws – especially if the black plastic bit keeps trying to pop off and squirt grease everywhere like with my pedals.

You’ll know it’s working when grease starts bubbling out around the pedal spindle (next to the “R”, above) and you can stop when it’s coming out clean-ish. I say ish, because I refuse to pump half a litre of grease through on grounds of being a huge cheapskate.

Once completed, the pedals should be smooth and have pretty much zero ‘spin’ when you flick them. Now you can stop feeling guilty about neglecting your bearings and go back to feeling guilty about never bothering to lube your cleats.

I have a love/hate/meh relationship with my Speedplays, incidentally; I like some of their features, principally the non-centering float, but the cleats are fussy and expensive, andthe company is, shall we say, difficult to love.**

[**Do your own research.]

Back to bike maintenance.

Since I was on a roll with the Speedplays, I decided to give my SPDs some love, starting with the two pairs of XTRs from the TCX and the XLS and finishing with the horribly neglected pair of cheapies on the Geophysicist’s commuting bike. I’m not writing a guide to servicing these as there are plenty of good ones out there, but I do recommend finding your nearest scientist and borrowing her favourite Christmas-themed tray on which to work:

Here’s some more new grease/old grease porn for your delectation:

Note the use of Park Tool’s peerless TP-1 (just £19.99 a roll) for general absorption and cleaning purposes.

If, like me, you are overly enthusiastic and extremely generous with the gooey stuff, you’ll probably end up driving the rubber seal part way out of the lock bolt/spindle assembly. I splashed out on the Park PC-1 for this very eventuality:

People who don’t know much about bicycles but who do know that I like them often ask me incredibly stressful, open-ended questions like “What road bike would you buy for £600?”

[TSP note: I've picked this number because it's roughly the minimum amount of money (at normal retail pricing) you can spend and get a road bike that isn't, for want of a better word, shit.]

The problem is that my own personal answer and the answer that would actually be useful to them are completely different from one another. Given a budget of £600 I would scrimp and scrounge for a decent frame and some used groupset parts, likely aiming only to buy a chain, cassette, cables and bar tape new. I’d also build my own wheels and find uses for the some of the random assortment of parts that litter my flat.

This approach is not an option for someone lacking the time, tools or mechanical nous to build their own bike, and it’s a complete non-starter if high street bike shops are your only resource for parts. So what does £600 buy you in a bike shop? Let’s look at an example.

There’s a lot to like here. Ok, the paintjob on this particular model is decidedly meh (the more expensive 1.2 and 1.5 are somewhat nicer) but for £600 you can leave the shop with a reasonably capable road bike with a sensible range of gears, geometry that will work for most people, mudguard compatibility, a carbon-legged fork and Trek’s lifetime frame warranty.

So why don’t we all ride these?

Well, aside from being aesthetically underwhelming, there are a number of ways that Trek keeps the price down. Although the 8 speed Claris groupset benefits (in a distinctly diluted manner) from the trickle-down that started many moons ago with the flagship Dura Ace 7800, you’re actually only getting the shifters and mechs from it. The rest is a mixture of bog-standard generic parts including a weighty square taper chainset and bottom bracket combination, and some indifferent unbranded brake calipers.

The wheels are heavy and basic too, with primitively sealed cup and cone hubs that the average Trek 1.1 buyer will neglect, and likely kill, before the rims have reached the end of their natural life from brake wear.

Digging a little deeper, we can see from the spec that the headset features “semi-cartridge bearings”. This rather mealy-mouthed term actually denotes low-grade caged bearings hidden under a basic seal – they aren’t cartridge bearings at all and they are not particularly resistant to a harsh operating environment like, say, winter.

In a similar vein, entry level bikes like this are often sold with with very cheap cables, including non-stainless inners that quickly fall victim to corrosion, leading to poor shifting and sluggish brakes.

And that, essentially, is what makes a cheap bike cheap. It’s not a matter of snobbery – a bike like the 1.1 is not fundamentally bad, and the frames are good enough quality that you could quite reasonably take the approach of gradually replacing parts as they wear out or seize up; but it’s important to understand when shopping for a bike that the differences between a £1200 bike and a £600 one are rather more nuanced than just the number of gears, or a few grammes here and there.

To show I’m not picking on Trek (they just happen to be a brand with which I’m intimately familiar) let’s take a look at…

Ok, so it’s twice the price of the 1.1. So it must be half the weight and twice as fast, right?

[TSP note: As it turns out, this topic is not the rich seam of comedy I'd imagined and I'm starting to depress myself. For some light relief, check out this product manual that Trek hilariously still keeps on their website. It's funny because LIES. ALL LIES.]

Well, no.

But in addition to a lighter, more pretend-aero frame with a snazzy tapered headtube, you do get almost a whole 105 groupset (the cranks are non-series, but still decent). Compared to Claris, 105 gets you two more cogs at the back, hidden shifter cables and parts that are considerably harder wearing and more resistant to corrosion over time. With the 2.3 you also get gen-yoo-wine catridge bearings in your hubs and your headset, and a carbon seatpost.

So, in conclusion, the answer to the original question is that the bike you should buy for £600 costs just £1200.

The findings come from a paper by Erik Postma, published in the Royal Society’s Biology Letters, which details a study in which female participants were asked to rate the attractiveness of riders who completed the 2012 Tour de France.

While the conclusions appear ostensibly intuitive, it strikes me that using stage race results is a flawed way of determining who is “faster”. The Tour isn’t a test of who is the fastest cyclist per se, it’s a test of who is best at winning the Tour, a feat that depends on a great many variables, including luck.

In fairness, the analysis does make use of the riders’ individual TT times and the author acknowledges the potential for error in his methods section:

“Professional cycling, and especially a three week stage race like the Tour de France, involves a substantial amount of tactics and teamwork.”

[...]

“Note that, depending on their role in the team (helper or leader), riders vary in their motivation to finish in as little time as possible. Although this role is likely to be correlated with their abilities, this will introduce some error. Also, I only measure one aspect of performance, emphasising endurance capacity and the ability to perform consistently over a relatively long period of time, and thereby this measure of performance is biased against sprinters and pure climbers.”

I’m not qualified to assess the quality of the statistical analysis so I may be talking out of my chamois, but it seems to me that rather than merely introducing error, the inherent flaws in the premise of the study render the results essentially meaningless.

This is the machine that took The Setback Post to a season-clinching 60th place in the Open CX at the John Muir Winter Carnival, held at Foxlake, East Lothian.

TSP’s Cormorant RT mechanics were tight-lipped about the details of this build, but under the mud is rumoured to lie a bone-stock Planet X XLS frameset kitted out with “components and wheels”, all chosen according to “what was on sale at the time”. TSP is alone in his team in having embraced disc brakes, and was heard to comment that they were “ok”, and very much “not a factor in keeping the game the same”.

The validity of his comments was emphatically underlined by the number of riders who beat him resoundingly riding supermarket mountain bikes and scrapheap single speeds.

Modesty aside, TSP’s lack of technical skills and fear of faceplanting in mud could not take away from a season finale that was, above all, mediocre. He’s looking forward to next year, when he will run his tubeless setup at a slightly lower pressure and is confident of a podium as a result.

A sniff of moisture had it behaving erratically and it expired completely in short order. Being highly organised, I never did get around to returning it, but I did swear that I would never again allow one of Knog’s cheerfully marketed rubber appendages to darken my portal, or enlighten my bicycle.

Come Christmas 2012, my ever-interfering family had other ideas, and amongst the trinkets and baubles of holiday cheer lurked a Knog Blinder rear light.

The giant misshapen hand was a gift from my parents too.

The main appeal of these is that in addition to the rubber strap mounting system, they are charged via USB, meaning that even the most resolutely forgetful cyclist need only remember to unhook the light from his ’pede and ram it into the nearest computing device. Given that most cyclists spend more time blogging about their bikes than actually riding them, this turns out to be eminently practical.

It also saves countless trips to Poundland in search of toxic triple-As.

I liked the Blinder enough that I bought the Geophysicist one. And she bought me a front to match the rear, so I’ve forgiven Knog for the aberration that was the ill-fated Skink.

Is this one light to rule them all? No, it is not. The Blinders are lights for being seen, not to see by, and while battery life is perfectly adequate, it is better suited to rides spanning cities rather than counties.

For the lazy urban cyclist in need of reasonably priced, convenient illumination however, they are hard to beat.

The tyres are Vittoria XG Pro clinchers – not the tubeless specific TNT edition incidentally, because I’m a huge cheapskate. The wisdom of this choice has yet to be put to the test: they are lighter and cheaper in their standard incarnation, but may carry a slightly increased risk of broken clavicle.

The part that really upsets me is that going tubeless means I can’t observe my usual practice of binning the stupid valve nut. We all have to make sacrifices.

TSP has not been ridden in extremis yet, but first impressions are promising. True to form, it’s ready in time for the very last race of the season, at which the Geophysicist will be representing on the TCX.

I’m not going to be reviewing these any time soon because you can’t review a product meaningfully until you’ve done your best to break it in a variety of comical mishaps, but I’m now in possession of a set of post-recall TRP Spyres, which are are bringing the The Secret Project to a halt with some alacrity.

In the next couple of months the usual suspects are going to run pieces about whether or not you need to shave your legs, and they’ll trot out a bunch of half-baked reasons, half-truths and bullshit lore. The terms “rite of passage”, “ritual” and “tradition” will come up a lot, and they’ll be accompanied by lots of bulging quad porn.

Thank Christ for wide angles.

Essentially, no one cares if you shave your legs, in the same way that no one cares if you have splash bar tape or a helmet from the mid-90s held together with gaffer tape. If those are your choices though, don’t be surprised if you’re shunned for your total disregard of others’ aesthetic sensibilities. Amateur cycling is a game of preening imitation and whether you admit it or not, the moment you pull on your team kit or your club’s jersey (the one with the logos of your local bike shop and the treasurer’s landscape gardening company on it), you are pretending to be a professional cyclist.

Why else would you choose to wear your matchy-matchy outfits? Why else doyou“train”? Why else would you pay for the privilege of of earning your 38th place in a Cat 4 road race on grey, unspectated B roads, if you don’t subscribe to some higher ideal of what riding a bicycle means?

It depends on my mood whether I cast this behaviour in a light of noble futility or pathetic self-delusion, but either way it’s pointless in the broader, cosmic sense.